


The Smart List

by Prochytes



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Ant-Man (2015), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 10:39:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4476242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being (anecdotally) one of the seven smartest people on the planet brings the burden and the privilege of interacting with the other six.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Smart List

**Author's Note:**

> Some dark themes and allusions to past mind rape. Spoilers for _The Incredible Hulk_ , _The Avengers_ (2012), _Avengers: Age of Ultron_ , _Iron Man 2_ , _Iron Man 3_ , _Thor: The Dark World_ , _Ant-Man_ , and _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D._ to the end of Season Two. Originally posted on LJ in 2015.

1\. Tony Stark (No. 1)

“So, Cho. Turns out you had an admirer.”

Helen pursed her lips, considering. Tony’s expression was altogether guileless. Haloed, now, by the hologram schematics that whirled around him, he looked almost within spitting distance of beatific. But Tony’s conversational sallies were like the contents of Natasha’s utility belt. What was delivered lazily and underarm usually wound up making the biggest bang.

Helen sighed, and braced for impact. “Really? Who was that?”

“Strucker. Yeah, I know.” Tony shrugged sympathetically as Helen wrinkled her nose. “Not exactly the kind of endorsement you’d want on your Linkedin profile. If it makes you feel better, you weren’t the only one.”

“How do you know this?”

“Guy made a list. Actually, guy made a lot of lists. I think that he might have been contemplating a career at BuzzFeed in case that whole ‘global domination’ thing didn’t pan out. Anyway, one of his lists, once we decrypted it, gave HYDRA’s ranking of the smartest people on the planet. Guess who entered the charts at number seven.”

“Hmm.”

“I know what you’re thinking. The whole idea’s flawed on so many levels. Firstly, objective assessment of intelligence is a notorious quagmire.”

“Exactly.”

“Secondly, so much of intelligence is contextual. Cap is the king of small-unit tactics, for example. Pepper owns everyone who has ever lived when it comes to financial spread-sheets.”

“Quite so.”

“Thirdly, you’re pissed that you’re as low as seventh.” 

Helen scowled. “So, who came out top of this ridiculous hit parade?”

Tony looked smug.

“Like I even had to ask…”

“Suck it up, Cho. Nine out of ten dead mad Nazis prefer me.” Tony scratched his beard. “Obvious methodological flaws aside, it’s a sobering thought.”

“And God knows, Tony, you need as many of those as you can get.”

“You could fit everyone on Earth who’s as smart as the two of us into my Jacuzzi.”

“You could fit the Green Bay Packers into your Jacuzzi, Tony. And still have room for Thor’s entire pantheon.”

“I’m loving the concept, though. Do you think that Foster owns a bikini? I’m guessing that she’s more of a one-piece kind of a gal.”

“How much is it worth to you that I never tell Thor or Pepper that you said that?”

“Your threat is empty, Cho. Potts is rightly confident of my unwavering devotion, and Thor doesn’t know what a bikini is.”

Helen rolled her eyes. “OK. I’ll bite. Show me the list.”

“I’ve just sent it to your tablet.”

Helen glanced down. “I see. No real surprises there. In fact, I’m overdue a consultation with most of them. I should make that a priority now… now I’m back on my feet.”

“Birds of a feather, Cho.” Tony, intent, once again, upon his schematics, seemed not to have noticed Helen’s hesitation. “Fly carefully.”

2\. Jane Foster (No. 3)

“I’m surprised that HYDRA left this base alone.”

“Snakes don’t like the cold.” Helen glanced through the transparent shielding into the cell beyond. She shivered. “And I suspect that they were just as scared of the inmate as everyone else is.”

S.H.I.E.L.D.’s former Alaskan station boasted exactly two claims to fame. It housed the world’s most sophisticated cosmic radiation sensing apparatus, and it contained the prison of The Abomination. Helen was here to maintain and harvest information from the one; Jane Foster, from the other.

The devices which sustained Blonsky’s stasis each had three separate back-up power sources. The transparent shielding around his cell was of the same design as the one that Fury had built to cage The Hulk. There was no rational reason to fear that anything could stir Blonsky from his sleep, or that he could escape should he awaken. Steve Rogers, in the course of his Twenty-First Century education, had observed how that sort of film tended to go, which was why Cap had insisted that Thor tag along as well. The Thunder God stood now by the doorway, watching over his beloved and her fellow mage as they worked, in voiceless vigil. 

Helen never knowingly turned down a chance to ogle the Odinson, but felt that to do so would be indecorous while Jane was actually in the room. In any event, the results from Blonsky’s scans were so absorbing as to chase all other considerations from her head. When she finally looked up, she could see that Jane, at her astronomical work-station, was equally enthralled. Helen watched Jane’s gaze dart from instrument to instrument and shivered again, this time in sympathy with what she herself knew so well: the dance of the data behind Jane’s restless eyes. _A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone._ Or Thales, so intent on the patterns that he has wrested from the stars that he misses the chasm yawning at his feet…

“Helen? Are you OK?”

Helen blinked, and composed herself. “Sorry. I was… thinking about something.”

Jane smiled pensively. “Aren’t we always? I’ve gathered all the information I need.”

“So have I.” Helen moved to the shielding. Jane walked across the room to stand at her side.

“They’d put you and me and Stark in there with him, you know,” said Helen, resting the fingers of her right hand on the screen. The cool mass of the unbreakable glass forestalled their shaking. “If they could see what it’s like inside our heads.”

Jane did not speak, but, after a moment, Helen felt warm fingers twine with hers. The two women stood silent for a while, hand in hand. At their backs, Thor fingered Mjölnir as he, too, watched The Abomination slumber, the vast ferment of flesh and machicolation of bone. 

3\. Fitzsimmons (No. 5)

“For heaven’s sake, Fitz. You can’t install a sonic screwdriver into the wretched thing. Quite apart from the fact that sonic screwdrivers don’t really exist…”

“But they could, Simmons. You’ve seen what Skye can do with her…”

Jemma Simmons cleared her throat meaningfully and glanced at Helen. Leo Fitz flushed, and hurried on: 

“Well, anyway, the theory’s sound.”

“The theory’s all very well, Fitz. But what about when Cou…. when the Director wants to scratch his nose? Or, you know…” Simmons’ hands flapped as though kneading vague semantic dough “… ablutions? He’s hardly going to thank you for having a multi-tool inside his new index finger then, is he?”

Number five on The List was, technically, two people. But one could understand how Strucker might have felt justified in stretching a point. 

Helen was at The Playground to consult upon the manufacture of a new prosthesis for S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Director. This endeavour had not been materially assisted by S.H.I.E.L.D.’s on-going reluctance to admit who that Director was. Helen wondered how long this pious fiction of everyone’s ignorance about Coulson’s resurrection would persist. Tony, who had once conducted his amours like something out of a spy novel, treated his relations with authentic spies like a marriage of several decades’ duration. Helen suspected that, as far as Tony was concerned, Phil Coulson was in the doghouse until he apologized first. 

Helen turned her head as Fitz dropped a pencil. The occasional lapses in motor coordination, coupled with the variation in speech patterns from the last time that Helen had met Fitz, spoke to hypoxia, probably sustained several months ago, leading to coma and subsequent successful rehabilitation. Diagnosis, prognosis, alternate treatments clicked into place, unbidden. You could take the girl out of the house, according to one of Tony’s better quips, but you couldn’t take the _House_ out of the girl. Helen had once plucked up the nerve to ask Bruce, whom Strucker had apparently honoured with the position of number two on The List, what it was like, in The Other Guy’s head. Bruce had pondered for a moment, and answered: “Quiet”.

Helen broke from her reverie to feel Simmons’ knowing eyes upon her. Despite Tony, and Bruce, and the others she had met in the last few years, Helen was still not altogether used to the idea that there were other people on Earth who could follow her thoughts. Simmons shuffled in her seat, as if to shield Fitz protectively from sight, and Helen found herself sharply afraid of this small woman, scarcely bigger than Jane, who, for all the clucking and the tutting and the _Doctor Who_ , was, when you got down to it, a spy. Natasha, too, was not an apparent threat until she started moving, and if Natasha was moving, you were already dead. With deliberation, Simmons ratcheted up her smile.

“So,” she said, “would you like us to show you the rest of The Playground now?”

4\. Erik Selvig (No. 6)

Erik appeared, unannounced, at the door to Helen’s New York apartment, a few days after her visit to The Playground. It had been a night of storms (because Nature loves a leitmotif) and fitful sleep. He carried an umbrella and a bottle of eighteen year old Glenmorangie.

“Jane sent me. She is worried about you,” he said, without preamble. 

Helen pulled at the collar of her dressing-gown. “She didn’t say anything in Alaska.”

“That is not her way. Thor says that Jane is the silence before the thunder.”

“That’s a lovely thought.” 

“It is. I aim to get drunk enough tonight to do it justice.” He lifted the bottle of whisky. “Will you join me?”

Three hours later, the tide had gone out in the Glenmorangie, and several small, but significant, advances in modelling possible effects of wormhole radiation on the human genome had been made, although Helen suspected that some of the fine detail would need to be checked again in the cold, and, above all, sober light of day. Erik filled Helen’s tumbler again, and sat back, looking at her with hooded eyes.

“I did my best,” she said, quietly. Erik nodded. “I fought Ultron as hard as I could. But I wasn’t strong enough. Not like you.”

“I was scarcely strong. I was Loki’s creature.”

“But you still built in a means to shut the Chitauri portal. Even with the Mind Gem inside your head.”

“I had much longer to gather the strength than you. And you played your part in defeating Ultron.”

“That was because Wanda broke me free.”

“I suspect that Miss Maximoff’s hex only worked because the will was there.”

“You’re very kind, Erik. But I don’t know.” Helen sipped at the Scotch, and shuddered. “I don’t need to tell you the worst of it.”

“All your life, the one thing you had relied upon was here.” Erik tapped his temple. “On a sudden, that was taken into another’s hands, just as you were made to understand exactly what it could do – or undo. Your mind was a razor, at the world’s throat. Perilous and helpless, all at once.”

Helen nodded. “How did you cope, afterwards?”

“I went a little crazy. I wouldn’t recommend it.” Erik rolled the whisky around his tongue. “But then I thought on what my mind could achieve now that it was my own again, as an antidote to brooding on what it had done when it was not. Will you try that for me, Helen, as one liberated thrall’s kindness to another?”

Helen smiled. “I can’t promise anything, Erik. But I’ll do my best.”

5\. Hank Pym (No. 4)

“You look kinda peaky, Helen. Are you feeling OK?”

“Better than in a while, actually, Hank. But also quite hung-over.” Helen continued to scroll through the numbers on her tablet. “These are all the data?”

“Yeah. Sorry they’re incomplete. Just a little project I’m working on to keep my hand in. I’d like your opinion on possible therapies for… er…. hypothetical stresses that might arise as a result.”

“‘Hypothetical stresses.’”

“Uh-huh.”

“Interesting ‘hypothesis’.” Helen sat back in her chair. “Curiously enough, these stresses look _exactly_ like how I’d model the effects on a human body of iterated fluctuations in relative atomic distance.”

Hank Pym unfurled an affable grin. “Come now, Helen. You don’t honestly imagine that I’m thinking of clambering back into the outfit?”

“I don’t think that _you_ are, Hank. Based on the fact that, from these data, one of the hypothetical subjects is a thirty-something woman in peak physical condition, I think that your daughter is.”

“My daughter’s a suit.”

“A suit, if memory serves, who once broke Tony Stark’s nose.”

Hank sagged. “Maybe I should have asked a slightly less smart doctor.” 

“I didn’t say that I wouldn’t help, Hank.” Helen leaned forward. “I’m just surprised, that’s all. You used to talk about the tech as though it were… I don’t know… Pandora’s Box.”

“You know who first told me the story of Pandora’s Box? If it _is_ just a story, that is. I’m aware that I’m talking to a lady who’s tried to pick up Mjölnir in a drinking-game.”

Helen laughed. “Who told you the story?”

“Peggy Carter. God knows why, because she hated it. Yet another way to blame a woman for everything, she said.” Hank sighed, and made a conspicuous fuss of polishing his glasses so that Helen could not see his face. “It’s been too long since I visited her. How is she?”

“She has her ups and downs.”

“I’ll get on to it. I’ve spent too much time looking backward, these last few years.” Hank met Helen’s gaze again. “The data… you think that we can do this?”

“Yes. With the medical advances since your heyday, I ‘m confident that we can mitigate the long-term toll of miniaturization. On your daughter, and on the new guy, who, I take it, is the gentleman whom I ran into her with downstairs.”

Hank’s eyes narrowed. “What were they doing?”

“Umm…..”

“They were making out again, weren’t they? Jesus Christ.” Hank heaved a deeper sigh. “Anyway, thank you, Helen. I think that we’ll do some good.”

“I hope so.”

“Hope’s what you find in the Box when all the bad things have gone.” Hank smiled as he showed Helen the door. “And believe me: it makes everything else worthwhile.”

6\. Helen Cho (No. 7)

“Welcome back, Cho. Where have you been?”

“San Francisco.”

“Pym?” Tony had still not looked away from his schematics. “How is the sour old bastard?”

“Happy. Happier than I’ve seen him in years. Don’t bother asking what we discussed – it’s privileged. Although he did ask after your nose.”

Tony snorted. “If his daughter tries that again, Pepper will _totally_ kick her ass.”

“Pepper would hold her coat, Tony. She understands what makes people punch you in the face.” Helen dropped her bag on the floor. The report echoed like a pistol shot. “As do I.”

“Ah.” Tony grimaced, and turned around. “Does this mean I’m busted?”

“It was only a matter of time, Tony. I am, in case you’ve forgotten, very smart.”

“Yeah. That was at once the point and the fundamental weakness of the plan.”

“Strucker never had a list, did he? You made it up. Putting yourself at the top was a bit of a give-away.”

“Well, I had to make it look realistic…”

Helen glared. Tony waved his hand to dismiss the holograms, and took a seat beside her. 

“You were hurting,” he said. “You were hurting, because of Ultron, and, since you’re stoical, and proud, and as stubborn as all-get-out, you were trying to bear the burden by yourself. That’s a song I know too well. I may or may not lead the authentic Smart List, Helen, but I’m sure as hell on top of the ‘not asking for help when you need it’ one. Remember that time when I wouldn’t meet with you face-to-face for three months, because you would have known inside your next three heart-beats that I had palladium poisoning?”

“I’ve heard tell that there’s such a thing as therapists.”

“Yeah. I play golf with mine. Great guy. He used to be married to that T-900 Terminator who flies Phil Coulson’s ’planes. Six degrees of separation, huh? I could have booked you a session. Would you have gone?”

Helen bit her lip. 

“See? Stubborn. Physician, heal thyself. I put the list together, Helen, to remind you that you’re not alone. That there are – a few – people on this planet who can think just as fast and deep and _strange_ as you, and who have to live with what that entails.”

“Ultron didn’t use you.”

“No. But I built him, along with Bruce. Before that, I invented the self-basting suicide bomber. We’re all compromised, Helen, even Hansel and Gretel over at the court of Good King Phil. How many of The Playground’s toys wound up in HYDRA’s hands? And then there’s Pym, for chrissakes. He managed to weaponize _The Borrowers_.”

“Jane’s an innocent.”

“Foster spent part of the year before last as a doomsday weapon. No way she gets to cast the first Infinity Stone.” Tony scratched his neck. “Anyway, the important thing is: did my little plan work?”

Helen considered. “Yes. Yes, it did. You’re still a manipulative jerkass. But yes, it did.”

“It’s official. Tony Stark has a heart.”

“I should know. I’m the one who designed it.”

Tony grinned. “Anyway. Time for your present.”

“Present?”

“Come now, Cho. I wouldn’t be much of a smartest man on Earth…”

“ _Self-crowned_ smartest man on Earth…”

“…. If I hadn’t foreseen that I’d eventually need to do some grovelling.” He brought back the holograms with another flick of his hand. “Get a load of this. Those subsidiary dissipation problems in that really rather brilliant gene-manipulation apparatus you designed? I think that I’ve got a handle on how to solve them.”

Helen looked, and eased herself back into the familiar, beloved crease and complication of the worlds that she could fold like origami inside her head. It was no bad thing, she reflected, to know that there were others who could fold these worlds as well. 

“Thank you. You’re a smart person, Mr. Stark.”

“Takes one to know one, Dr. Cho.”

FINIS

**Author's Note:**

> Helen’s thoughts encompass, at various points, William Wordsworth _The Prelude_ 3.62-3 and Plato _Theaetetus_ 174a. I am indebted to _AoS_ fanon for the idea that Helen helped with Phil Coulson's hand.


End file.
